


Girlfriend Tax

by jerseydevious



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Future Fic, HOOmst, and i'm still trying to figure out how i want to write in this universe [tear emoji], they're in college this is mostly fluff because i got Softe about them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:01:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26003080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: Annabeth and Percy have a lazy morning.
Relationships: Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson
Comments: 54
Kudos: 335





	Girlfriend Tax

**Author's Note:**

> This is just dumb fluff that I got around to finishing because my friends made me really, really soft about Percabeth. What has happened to me. Remember when I wrote things that made people sad?

Demigods were invariably light sleepers; _lights out_ at Camp Half-Blood meant _everyone shut the fuck up right the hell now and don’t do anything louder than a sneeze for the next nine hours,_ whereas at other summer camps it might’ve just meant _lights out._ Emphasis on _might’ve,_ because Annabeth had never attended another summer camp, and what she knew about them, she knew through movies, mainly the _Friday the 13th_ franchise. Both Percy and Sally were big fans of classic horror movies, and although Annabeth didn’t get the appeal, she had enough fun stealing Percy’s popcorn on Saturday night movie marathons that she didn’t mind sitting through a couple herself. She’d asked Percy once when he was walking her back to her dorm, after several hours of Jason Vorhees’s gleeful hockey-masked murder sprees, if he’d ever gone to a summer camp before Camp Half-Blood, and he’d blurted out, “Those delinquent turnaround camps, with all the community service. But it was winter break. Does that count?”

“Why would that count, that’s not a summer camp, it was winter,” she’d said. _“Did_ you go to—one of those?”

Percy shrugged. Judging from the way he wasn’t looking at her, he hadn’t intended to say anything, but his tendency to speak without thinking had gotten the better of him. “Maybe. A little bit. But both times it was during the winter, so—”

_“Both_ times,” Annabeth said. 

Percy shrugged again, but it was less of a shrug and more of an awkward, strained wiggle, the kind of gesture he made when he really wanted to stop talking about something, but was too embarrassed to ask to stop talking about it. Annabeth was deeply, painfully curious, as she always was whenever Percy’s childhood came up; it took a special set of circumstances for life to craft a twelve-year-old willing to mail Medusa’s head to the gods, and then personally stab Ares in his godly heel. Even among demigods Percy had been willing to go farther, to push boundaries that maybe shouldn’t have been pushed. She’d pressured him about it as a headstrong tween, but Percy dodged questions better than he dodged bullets, and if she tried for too long he’d just get angry, anyway, and Percy wasn’t a fun person to be around when he was angry. Her curiosity hadn’t lessened over the years, but she was more accustomed to the idea that he’d talk to her if he needed to, now, and sometimes Sally would catch her staring at their old photographs and share a memory or two. Or five. Annabeth got the impression that Sally had been waiting in the wings for someone to come along who loved her son at least a quarter as much as she did, so she could jump down from the metaphorical rafters and gush about him. It was sweet. Sometimes it made Annabeth ludicrously jealous, sometimes Annabeth wondered what her life would have been like if Frederick Chase had been one tenth the parent Sally Jackson had been, but it was sweet. Sweetness that burned her throat all the same.

Demigods were invariably light sleepers. Lights out at Camp Half-Blood was taken very seriously, because when you lived under the knowledge that something could crawl out of the darkness and eat you the second you stepped into the real world, you learned basic safety habits. Percy wasn’t used to the seriousness campers took _it’s time to go the fuck to bed_ with, because Percy was the only one who stayed in his cabin, and when he lived with Sally, he had his own room; which was why Annabeth was glad he went to sleep before she did almost every night, because he got up at four-thirty every morning and Annabeth had crafted her schedule at Cornell around the fact that she was a night owl, and years at Camp Half-Blood hadn’t managed to beat it out of her. She didn’t know if she could take Percy re-watching _Stargate_ with the volume on maximum while trying to sleep.

It’d taken a couple of months for him to learn how to slip out of their shared bed without waking her up too much, and that as cute as she thought the goodbye-I-love-you forehead kisses were, she would really prefer the sleep, because after Percy kissed her sometimes she’d lie there feeling a happy buzz in her chest and she’d never get back to sleep. He did, however, still wake her up when he was late, because when he was late he ran through the apartment with a non-stop mumbled track of Spanglish falling from his mouth—but he wasn’t late all that often. He hadn’t ever had to learn how to sneak into the house _after_ she’d gone to bed, though, and now his weakness in that area was all too evident.

“Don’t you dare take a shower,” she mumbled, into her pillow. “I can’t sleep with the shower running. It’s loud. It’s right there.”

She didn’t open her eyes. She heard the creaking of wood somewhere near the end of the bed, and guessed Percy was rifling through the dresser for clothes. There was a soft rumble of laughter, and gods, she had a love-hate relationship with that sound; as Percy’s voice dropped, so did his laugh, and if she was being entirely honest there was something unbearably attractive about the way he could laugh and it sounded like the thunder of a car engine, but sometimes she missed his stupid, awful, squeaky teenager laugh. She’d spent years making fun of how his voice cracked almost every time he said something. Those had been good times, saying something like _you sound like you swallowed helium_ and Percy flushing and struggling for a response and then settling on a childish, _I do not, shut up. You—shut up._ But maybe growing up with someone was to lose the pieces of them that had made them a child, to learn to love the version of themselves they forged later.

“Don’t you dare,” she mumbled again, blinking open one bleary eye at him. 

“Annabeth,” he said, “I don’t think you want me laying down in our bed covered in horse afterbirth.”

“We have a couch,” she suggested, helpfully, and Percy laughed again. Sometimes, these days, when she drank nectar, she thought she could hear Percy’s laugh in the taste of it, which was impossible and made no sense—but their lives didn’t really make much sense, either. Maybe she could. She tasted their first (second, they didn’t talk about the first) kiss, brackish water and salt and overly sweet cupcake icing, when she drank nectar, anyway.

Percy ducked into the adjacent bathroom. The door clicked shut, softly, and a few seconds later the shower rattled to life, and Annabeth resigned herself to being awake at five forty-five in the morning and pulled herself out of bed. She could at least enjoy the steam from Percy’s shower, like a sauna, before she had a cup of coffee, so she wandered in after him, and stuffed a towel in the crack underneath the door so none of the precious steam escaped. 

She pushed herself up on the counter, crossed her legs beneath her. Thanks to her sizable college fund, a gift of both her family’s sense of tradition and immense guilt, they’d been able to afford a decent apartment, because as much as she loved Percy and Percy’s family, Sally was a writer and Paul was a teacher and the frequent trips here and there to Camp Half-Blood made Percy and herself too unreliable to have a job the last two years of high school, so there wasn’t much in the way of _savings_ on that front. So thanks to her father, they had a counter in their bathroom, one big enough for her to perch on. This habit of hers annoyed Percy endlessly, because he was someone who liked countertops cleared of clutter, and he’d bitched and moaned about her dirty feet being on perfectly clean surfaces. At least once she’d poked him in the face with her big toe in response, because they’d been lounging on the couch, and the spluttering, choking noise he’d made while he shoved her away had been more than worth it.

“What time did you go to bed?” Percy asked.

Annabeth scrubbed at her eyes. She wasn’t fond of being asked a direct question prior to having three cups of coffee and breakfast, and also before noon. College had destroyed her ability to be semi-functional in the morning; she’d never known the joy of doing nothing before. “Two,” she said. “Two thirty. Two forty-five.”

“That’s three separate times. I did ask for only the one.”

“Somewhere in there,” she said. “What’s, uh—what did you say, in there, you said something that I thought was weird.”

Percy laughed, again, the sound of it bouncing off the tile walls of the shower. “Being covered in afterbirth, probably.”

“Congratulations,” Annabeth said. 

“He’s beautiful,” Percy said, and she could hear the expression on his face—it was the stupid one that made her heart squeeze, which maybe described every expression he'd ever made with his face, but this one was the broad beaming smile and deep dimples, eyes turned up at the corners, laugh lines carved into his brown skin. 

“You’ll be a lovely mother,” Annabeth said. She reached to her side, flicked the sink on, and then pulled her toothbrush out of the cute little owl-themed toothbrush holder she’d bought on sale at Big Lots, flicked it under the water, and started brushing her teeth.

“You joke,” Percy said, “but, uh. Bella was very excited that a son of Poseidon was at the birth of her son, and she—I don’t know, thinks it’s a sign that her son will do great things? I’m flattered, and all, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’m there all the time because I get paid to be, and I was paid overtime to keep her calm while her boy was born. I feel bad. I have an obligation to him, now, I think.”

“What’s his name?” she asked, around the toothbrush.

“Bello.”

“Ah, yes, very original.”

Percy snorted. “Be quiet, that’s my son you’re talking about.”

Annabeth took her toothbrush out of her mouth. There was no toothpaste on it. She was kind of glad Percy had missed that one. Snagging the Colgate from the other side of the counter, she squeezed some out on the bristles, and said, “Why do you have an _obligation_ to him?”

“All the horses at the barn think they’re so lucky, that they’re blessed somehow,” Percy said. “And I’ve tried explaining the whole, uh, capitalism thing? But it’s so hard to explain capitalism to horses. They just think they’re lucky, and they’ve been blessed, because Poseidon sent his only half-mortal son just to take care of them. Bella’s convinced I’m there for Bello, specifically. She’s been bragging to all the other mares about how I’m going to love her son best. I can’t let her down.”

Annabeth stared very hard at a spot on the wall. They needed to pick up magic erasers, specifically to scrub that spot off, but for the moment it made a good point to focus her intensely fond confusion. “It’s way too early to unpack all of that,” she said. “But I want to focus on one thing. Desperately, I want to focus on this thing. You tried to explain capitalism to horses?”

“I don’t want them to get their hopes up!” Percy said. “They think I’m special and I’m really just a guy who needed a job, and is taking advantage of, like, one of the three whole talents I have.”

“You tried to explain capitalism to horses because you thought the horses had too high an opinion of you,” Annabeth said, dully. 

“I can’t just _disappoint_ them,” Percy said, helplessly.

It was clear to Annabeth just by the tone of his voice that this was something that had actually, genuinely been weighing on him, the stress of the expectations of the roughly seventy-three horses at the barn Percy worked at. The same horses that Percy had told her over dinner last week that he’d taught them the meaning of the word _bro,_ and now all the geldings called each other _bro,_ but they refused to not call Percy _lord,_ so Percy was now referred to as _Lord Bro._ He’d been ecstatic. The second he’d left to go pick up their Chinese take-out order, Annabeth had called Rachel and asked for help. It had been a five-minute-and-three-second phone call of Annabeth wheezing and crying with laughter while Rachel asked what was wrong, until Annabeth had finally been able to work out, _I love my idiot so much but gods in Olympus he’s such an idiot,_ and then she’d immediately hung up. She couldn’t risk explaining. She’d laugh until her lungs were a squishy pulp.

“You can. They’re literally just horses. I think if you disappoint them, they’ll be mad for half an hour before they get distracted by, I don’t know, whatever the hell it is that horses get distracted by,” Annabeth said. “Carrots, I think. Chiron could never control himself around carrots. You can absolutely disappoint a bunch of horses, Lord Bro.”

“That is a sacred title. Don’t throw it around slanderously. And they’re not _just horses._ They’re people too.”

“Please no surprise vacations to Florida.”

“What?” Percy asked. The shower cut off. Percy was always pretty quick with showers, even though he enjoyed them in a way only a son of Poseidon could. He had a thing about keeping the utilities bill down, so when the water was running too long, he started to make distressed noises; which ground against Annabeth's newly-found, intense love of really long, blisteringly hot showers. She’d always had to hop in the shower and go, bouncing between Camp and boarding schools and the occasional shower at Sally’s. They didn't really fight in the classic two-people-screaming-at-each-other way, because it took monumental force and effort to make Percy yell at her these days, and it took surprisingly little effort for her to yell at Percy, so their fights were Percy getting increasingly sardonic while Annabeth wholly lost her mind—but many of those one-sided shouting matches were had over the utilities bill. It was both the stupidest, most useless argument they had, and also the one they had every month, without fail.

“The last time you said that, it was about the pod of bottlenose dolphins visiting camp last summer, and then I woke up the next day to a voicemail from you explaining that you were in Florida, but it’s okay, dolphins are people, too.”

Percy’s arm slipped out of the shower and pulled his towel off of the towel rack. A long, jagged scar from his wrist to his inner elbow flashed. “Okay, I know I maybe shouldn’t have disappeared before talking to you face-to-face, but I let everyone know I was leaving, and I let everyone know where I was going, and goddammit, no one will give me a break.”

“You skipped a week of camp to go solve dolphin problems in Florida and then when you came back you explained it as dolphin _mafia_ problems.”

“It’s not my fault the two families started trying to kill an innocent calf to—”

Annabeth giggle-snorted, and God, what an awful sound, but it was something about her Percy would instantly laugh at, and sure enough he was stepping out of the shower with his towel wrapped around his waist, laughing. Unfortunately Annabeth giggle-snorted too hard, and in her defense the sudden appearance of a half-naked Percy would elicit a sharp jerk from anyone with eyes and an appreciation for art, but the glob of toothpaste she’d left on her toothbrush rolled off and dropped right on her thigh.

Percy swiped it up with his index finger and flicked the toothpaste in the sink. “Smooth,” he said. But at least he hadn’t seen her try to brush her teeth without toothpaste.

And maybe there were other reasons, that someone would jerk away from seeing Percy shirtless; the left side of his chest, inching across his stomach and his hip, the outside of his arm, even crawling up his neck and splashing into the hollow of his cheekbone were twisted, rumpled burn scars, lighter in some places and darker in others. Visual evidence that he’d nearly died in Mount Saint Helens, the only evidence that he’d almost died, but also the only evidence that he’d survived it at all. Percy hated them but tried to pretend to her he didn’t. She hated the lie more than anything, but she was never exactly sure how to call him on it. She would sound insane, snapping, _your confidence right now looks uncomfortable and I really need you to stop trying to force it before you break something. I love the you you’re trying not to be._

“I’ve been trying to brush my damn teeth for your whole shower, and you kept distracting me, so it’s your fault,” she said. 

“Fine, fine, I’ll go,” he said, waving a hand, turning towards the door.

“Your clothes are in here, you dork,” she said, pointing to the neatly folded stack on the toilet. “Besides. You woke me up early. This is your penance.”

“What,” he said, eyebrow raised. “What’s my penance?”

“I demand shirtless time,” she said, squeezing another bit of toothpaste onto her toothbrush. She shrieked a little after Percy shook his head like a dog, spraying her with droplets of water. “Stop that! It’s my _right.”_

It was her right. It was positively her right. There were strict rules and regulations; being up this early required benefit, and if the benefit was some shameless ogling, that was more than acceptable, for Annabeth. There would be fines incurred if the rules and regulations were violated. Fines consisting of Percy’s pancakes, which he had (presumably, and Annabeth guessed this because they were always blue) learned from his mother, and also maybe a lazy make out session on the couch. Fines were also redeemable whenever Annabeth wished, and to be honest, sometimes she redeemed fines for violations that had never occurred—because Percy could never say no to her.

“So if you wake _me_ up early, I get to see _you_ in yoga pants.”

Annabeth stared at him flatly. “I will never wake you up early. You get up at four fucking thirty in the morning. You get up before Apollo does." 

Percy shrugged. “You never know. Things could change. I’m just saying, if this is a rule we’re going to have, I want in.”

Annabeth brushed her teeth for a few seconds, because her breath was truly ghastly and she was tired of the feeling of gunk on her teeth, before she responded around a mouthful of Colgate. “You’re literally never going to get to use this rule.”

“Okay, then make one that I actually can use.”

“I’ll think of one after I’ve enjoyed this,” she said. She unfolded one of her legs and poked him in the thigh with her foot. “If you ask me to stop wearing your socks, though, that’s off the table. That’s not available.”

Percy snorted, and when he tried to get dressed immediately, Annabeth kicked his hand away from his stack of clothes and said, very seriously, “Brush your teeth. Shave. Then you can have a shirt.”

“Careful, I’m starting to think you actually find me attractive,” he’d said, and she’d leaned over and shoved him. She wanted to say something biting like _how dare you accuse me of that_ but she couldn’t even form the words, because the fact that she found Percy ridiculously alluring no matter what he did—even if it was just brushing his teeth, minus most clothing, rifling through literally every drawer in their bathroom because he could never just put his razor in the same spot—wasn’t something she could lie about. Wasn’t something she would lie about, wasn’t something she had the heart to do, because after Mount Saint Helens Percy had spent three years wearing a jacket even in the hottest weather just to hide what he could.

After Percy was clothed in more than a towel and Annabeth had brushed her hair—or, she had brushed half of it, and then Percy brushed the rest of it while she washed her face, because Percy had the weirdest fascination with her mop of blonde curls and had taken the brush out of her hands, making annoyed clucking noises about how she was ripping her hair out—they wandered into the kitchen. Annabeth zeroed in on the coffeemaker, which had been a housewarming gift from Chiron and had a self-cleaning enchantment on it, courtesy of an enterprising son of Hecate, and Percy made his way over to the fridge. 

“What do you want for breakfast,” he said, pushing stuff around on the shelves. “We got—I don’t know, uh—well, we’ve got a ton of stuff.”

They didn't. Annabeth personally thought they desperately needed to go grocery shopping, which was admittedly her job because Percy got very easily distracted when surrounded by wall-to-wall food, and he tended to always buy the cheapest version of everything, anyway. He bought off-brand oreos and ate them as if they were the real thing, instead of what they actually were; cardboard painted to look like oreos. His tastebuds were made of cast iron. So Annabeth did the grocery shopping, and when she got back Percy frowned importantly at the receipt and then shoved it in their mighty drawer of receipts, which probably included everything they had ever bought as a couple. He collected them for no apparent reason. Somehow whenever Annabeth remembered to empty out the receipt drawer, Percy would walk in just as she was opening it, and he would be greatly offended on her encroachment into his domain. Enough to scowl at her, at least, even while he ducked to kiss her cheek in greeting.

But Percy always seemed to think if they had a jar of peanut butter and at least one piece of bread they'd made out like kings. For a guy who could eat an entire large pizza by himself, in one sitting, and not spend the rest of the night in a food coma, and still maybe be able to down a pint of ice cream later, it was a strangely optimistic way of viewing a pantry. 

“You don’t have to cook breakfast,” Annabeth said. She was being polite. He definitely _did_ have to cook breakfast, if they were going to cook breakfast, because Annabeth sucked at cooking despite all of Sally’s attempts to teach her, and Percy had absorbed ninety-five percent of Sally’s qualities. And ninety-five percent of all of Sally’s other qualities. Percy had absorbed almost every major lesson in his life from her, like a tiny little sea sponge—less tiny, now, though. He was a foot taller than Sally. When they hugged it moved something behind and below Annabeth’s heart, because Sally tried to hold her son like he was a little boy, instead of a man with shoulders wider than Sally herself. As cute as Percy had been that brief time he’d been shorter than her, and as liberating as ruthlessly mocking him for his height deficiency had been, Annabeth couldn’t say she was ungrateful for the way puberty had stretched Percy like a rubber band. Now his endearing personality came with a beautiful view. Now his hugs felt like they wrapped her up.

“Well, we can starve, too, I guess,” Percy said, eyes still intent on the contents of the fridge.

“I mean,” Annabeth said. “I can possibly scramble an egg.”

“I have great faith in your ability to scramble an egg,” Percy said. 

“Oh, you don’t even sound sarcastic, that’s so sweet of you.”

Percy turned to her, looking smug. “I was thinking about drakon eggs, but if you _want_ to believe in yourself and try to cook, I won’t stop you.”

Annabeth took a long sip of her coffee. The caffeine almost instantly settled her brain, although that was probably just the placebo effect at work. “There’s always Panera. You don’t have to cook. I think Panera's open. Maybe?"

Percy made a face and pulled a carton of eggs out of the fridge, and then a packet of chicken sausage, and then a tin of those flaky biscuits she loved. “I’d make pancakes, but I’ve been up all night with the miracle of childbirth. I'd just start eating the batter and fall asleep on the couch.”

He’d done that before. He usually fell asleep with the bowl, too, and Annabeth had to rescue it before it tipped over on the carpet. The Curse of Achilles had an outright weird effect on Percy’s energy levels, one that, not for lack of trying, neither of them could really discern; it ought to have been correlated to how much activity he did in a day, how much fighting, but there would be lazy Sundays where Percy did a grand total of nothing and still fell asleep in the middle of saying something. And then there would be times when Percy didn’t sleep for a few days in a row, without even seeming to notice.

“What’s that face for, Panera’s totally a valid option,” she said. “I could get dressed. Especially if you’re tired. I can be awake at this hour, promise. My treat."

“It’s not that, I know you can go from half-dead to killing monsters in three seconds flat, it’s just.” Percy made a disgruntled noise in the back of his throat. “Panera’s… _Panera.”_

Annabeth raised a brow. She liked Panera perfectly fine. There was nothing wrong with a good Panera Bread. “Literally what did Panera ever do to you.”

“It’s kind of expensive, I guess,” he said. “Half a sandwich is six fucking dollars. I can buy the stuff for a sandwich for six fucking dollars, and then I can make ten sandwiches. Maybe eleven."

She didn’t want to tell him that he could probably buy stuff for sandwiches for half of that amount, because Percy’s favorite sandwich in the world was a slice of baloney, a slice of Kraft American cheese, all between two slices of the Great Value bargain-brand bread. She’d made a point of mentioning to him before that he could at least add mustard, and that even when she’d been on the run with Thalia and Luke, they’d all at least had the decency to rob the people walking out of McDonald’s before they resorted to the high crime of a condiment-less baloney sandwich. Then he’d asked, _do you really want me to start eating a ketchup sandwich in front of you,_ and Annabeth had stared at him.

“I mean, it’ll be the breakfast menu,” Annabeth said. “So probably not a sandwich.”

Percy stuck his tongue out at her. “I can eat a sandwich for breakfast if I want to.”

“You can’t actually be worried about our finances, though,” she said. “I mean, we’re fine. You work, you get paid pretty well, and for fuck’s sake, you work all the time. My dad’s still trying to buy my forgiveness. I’ve got sweet scholarship money to supplement where we need it. We don’t have that many expenses. We’re fine.”

“Eating out isn’t a good habit,” Percy said. 

“Babe, you’re dead tired, we can just go get something and be back here in fifteen minutes,” she said. 

Percy didn't put the supplies he'd pulled out of the fridge away, but he stood there, staring at them like they'd offended him personally. "I'm not dead tired," he said, at last. Of _course_ that was the thing that had rubbed him the wrong way.

"Okay, maybe not dead tired, but you don't have to be more tired than you've ever been in your life to say fuck it, I want an egg muffin." 

"Why the hell would I ever want an egg muffin, it’s an egg muffin, it’s basically an affront to the gods. Don’t call it a muffin if it’s not sweet, it’s that fucking simple.”

"You'd like them if you put hot sauce on it," Annabeth said, and she downed the rest of her coffee and padded off to their bedroom, in search of pants, and one of Percy's shirts. It was too early to consider a bra, and if she wore one of Percy's shirts, well, they were big enough on her now that no one would notice. Benefits of being the smaller one—his clothes were her clothes.

Pants applied, a generic Pepsi t-shirt Percy had probably gotten from loitering in a Goodwill stolen, and then she was finishing a second cup of coffee in the kitchen before they left. 

Percy squinted at her. "I can't tell if that shirt’s mine, or if you bought it like that. Isn’t everyone wearing baggy clothes now?" 

"Wouldn't you like to know, water boy," she said, swallowing down a burning mouthful of black coffee. 

It was nice, being late spring, but the morning was even nicer than usual. Crisp, only mildly chilly, but she leaned closer to Percy and siphoned some of his heat. She'd lucked out, because that meant her decision to not wear a bra would go off without a single questioning glance thrown her way. Percy's hand was warm and calloused, interlaced with her fingers, and every so often he lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles, because he was alarmingly sweet. But then she noticed he seemed to do it exactly every half-block, because the little pavilion where the Panera was happened to be a couple blocks away, and then Annabeth felt a bit like a sexy, funny pedometer. 

Panera wasn't open yet. Percy gave her a triumphant look, and opened his mouth to no doubt say something nauseatingly victorious, but then a neon sign caught her eye and she pulled him into a tiny, twenty-four-hour diner down the street and all but pushed him down in a booth situated at the furthest, quietest corner. 

"I thought the point of this was to grab something and go,” he said, but he was adjusting himself in his seat anyway. “Fifteen minutes, right?”

Annabeth slithered in beside him, instead of sitting across from him, because she wanted the feel of his thigh pressed against hers. “Well, now it’s a date. We never go on those.”

Percy flicked her knee. “We go on dates all the time.”

“Turning on a movie while I do my homework and then falling asleep on the couch half an hour into it is not a date,” Annabeth said. 

“Now you’re excluding the couch. What did the couch ever do to you? He’s a very important part of our relationship.”

“Bold of you to assume our couch is male. Her name is Layla, thank you very much, and I’m not excluding Layla. I just have standards. If you drool at all during any part of the date, it doesn’t count as a date.”

Percy looked affronted. “That discounts _every_ date I’ve ever had with you. I’m always drooling over you. Your beauty is like—cyanide, but for my brain, babe.”

Annabeth laughed but smothered it in his shoulder, almost said _all cyanide is cyanide for your brain, dipshit_ because a waitress was walking their way. She had a bright green hair clip pinning back curly bangs, one far too small to be made for adults.

Percy gestured to his forehead. “I like the clip,” he said, but in a way that didn’t feel mocking, somehow.

The waitress laughed. “My daughter, she heard me leaving for my shift, woke up just to do my hair,” she said.

Annabeth smiled, if a little tight around the edges, but Percy cooed. “How old is she?” he asked.

“Seven,” the waitress said, brightly. “Deanna, she’s—she’s a character, alright. Lots of work, you know? But she’s my world.”

“Deanna, that’s cute,” Percy said. The waitress took their drink orders with a beaming smile, Annabeth half-hiding behind Percy when it was her turn to speak up, because she hadn’t anticipated sitting in a dining room and she was suddenly conscious of her lack of a bra.

“Cute kid,” Annabeth said, when she had left.

Percy hummed. “I did that. The, uh—I used to wake up and hang out with my mom when she got ready. She’d always try to get me to go back to bed, but I was stubborn. Used to buy her hair clips like that when I got a little older.”

“Buy,” Annabeth said, tasting the word. “With what money?”

Percy grinned. It was the lopsided one, where the right corner of his mouth ticked higher than the left, the dimple on that side of his face pulled deeper, the one that she’d used to think branded him a troublemaker, but honestly these days she felt it had more similarity to a smiling Labrador. “Had kind of a business with one of the other kids in the building. We hated each other but we were both good enough at basketball, right, so we had this racket, where we’d hang out around the nicer areas, wait for some asshole kids to challenge us to a game. And then we’d start a bet, and then we’d lose.”

Annabeth frowned. “That doesn’t sound lucrative.”

Percy snickered. “Oh, no, we picked their pockets while we were playing. The bet was only so we’d know they’d have something to pick their pockets for. We were supposed to lose. And then we ran down the street and hid on someone’s fire escape when the other kids figured out they’d been robbed.”

Annabeth drew a circle over the back of Percy’s hand, tapped the fine ridges of his knuckles. “All that, to get your mom some hair clips.”

Percy flicked his hands, moving them expansively. “I got shook down for most of it. But, yeah, hair clips.”

Annabeth worked her jaw for a moment, scrambling for something to say that accurately conveyed the way her heart squeezed, the way it felt like her skin was almost tingling, like the gentle rays of the sun in the early morning. She tried to imagine a ten year old Percy slapping a packet of hair clips on the counter of a CVS, digging a week’s worth of crumpled up bills out of his pocket. And she realized she’d seen Sally wear hair clips like that, that she’d always seen Sally with at least one clip slipped into her hair, because Percy’s mom had treasured the gifts enough to keep them. Of course she had. The only thing Annabeth could think to do was press a kiss into the soft cloth over Percy’s shoulder and hope that he could feel it the way she did, hope that he could feel the butterflies fluttering their delicate, powdery wings in her throat, in the base of her heart.

Percy’s head turned and dropped a light kiss into her hair, and then jerked as their waitress rounded the corner and dropped their drinks on the table. Neither of them had even looked at the menu, yet, but Annabeth asked if they served pancakes, and Percy ordered blueberry while she ordered chocolate. 

Percy made a noise, a deep sound from the bottom of his chest, and tapped her nose. “I’m supposed to be getting a rule, by the way.”

Annabeth knocked her knee against his. “You’re still on that. Hm. What’s something I do to you?”

Percy looked her in the eyes, then, and his gaze wasn’t at all joking; his eyes were unusually expressive, and there was a certain magic to them, that sea-glass. She wondered if it was because they were Poseidon’s eyes, and it was hard to prepare for the eyes of a god set in a mortal’s face, or if it was because they were shaped like Sally’s, that every inch of Percy carried his mother with him. Maybe he didn’t need to be the son of the Earthshaker, to level people the way he could the land, maybe he just needed to be his mother’s son.

“Annabeth Chase,” he said, finally, “what _don’t_ you do to me.”  
  
  


Annabeth’s face burned red. She elbowed him in the ribs again, only a little bit annoyed that he wouldn’t really feel it, thanks to the Curse. “You’re way too much. I need you to shut up right now. You’re at a fifteen, and I need you at a three.”

Percy laughed. “Okay, uh. Well, you take my clothes a lot, I have to do my laundry twice as much as you have to do yours.”

“No, that can’t be the rule, I already told you that. I would always owe you. Your clothes are my clothes now, and that’s final. Girlfriend tax,” she said. His elbows were braced on the table. She entwined her arm with his, tucking her shoulder beneath. 

“I want a boyfriend tax,” Percy whined. 

“We’ll work on that after you have your own rule,” Annabeth said. “What’s the most annoying thing I do?”

“The _clothes,”_ Percy said, pointing to her shirt. “It’s the clothes! I’m literally always doing laundry. You never do laundry. You even wear my pants. I don’t even have my own socks anymore. I want—what was it?—penance for clothes-related crimes.”

“I’m not budging, I refuse to pay up,” Annabeth said, sipping her drink. “Maybe you should just switch to wearing my clothes.”

Percy frowned, as if he were considering it. “Buy all your clothes in an extra large. I’ll make it work.”

Annabeth giggled. “Okay, fine. I’ll drop off all of my clothes at Goodwill and go shopping. Enjoy your new wardrobe. You have to wear my softball outfit at least once.”

Percy didn’t have a great response to this, so he stuck his tongue out at her. 

Their bickering continued until their food came; bickering always subsided in favor of food, Percy’s one true love. Annabeth hadn’t realized how much she’d missed this. Of course, she always had Percy, but a lot of the time she was between classes or buried in schoolwork and when Percy got off of work, he was always pretty exhausted, because his job was physically demanding. A lot of their evenings were spent just basking in each other’s company before Annabeth had to run out to her later classes, and by the time she got back from those and her late night study groups, Percy was usually passed out, most of the time on the couch. She’d needle him into sleeping in their actual bed and he’d grumble but slink off down the hall anyway, and then she spread her notes across the coffee table and worked. They had a routine. She hadn’t missed being near him, but she’d maybe missed _talking_ to him, and wasn’t it strange, that she could miss someone she saw every day.

“I should try becoming a morning person,” she said. 

Percy paused, an obscene forkful of pancakes halfway to his mouth. “Becoming… a morning person?”

Annabeth shrugged. “I miss this.”

Percy’s brows knitted together. “We’ve never been here before?”

Annabeth buried her laugh in his shoulder. “No,” she said, after a moment. “I mean you. I miss you.”

“I _live_ with you,” Percy said. He noticed that the obscene forkful of pancakes was tipping dangerously to the side and shoved the fork inelegantly into his mouth. 

“We do, but it’s—you are so gross, you have maple syrup all over your face—it’s different, you know, getting to talk,” she said. 

Percy, to his credit, waited until he’d finished chewing to respond. There had been a horrifying amount of times in her life where he hadn’t waited to finish chewing to say something. Refreshing change, but again, sometimes she did miss the childish idiocy of being thirteen and dumping her drink on his head because he did it just to rile her up, she was _convinced._ “What the hell,” he said, finally. “What do you mean, different. I talk to you all the time.”

“We talk all the time, sure, but it’s about—bills. What I did that day. The fact that you have cajoled a lot of innocent horses into language crimes. Bills, again, we talk a lot about bills. Gods, I need you to stop starting conversations about bills. We don’t really… banter, all that much.”

“You need me to stop starting conversations about bills,” Percy said, dully. 

Annabeth took a careful bite of her food. They were, actually, objectively good pancakes. “Yes,” she said. “I do feel kind of hounded about my coffee spending.”

“Good, because you should, because your coffee-related spending is insane. We own a very fancy coffee maker. It’s an enchanted coffee maker. It’s a coffee maker enchanted by godly power, even, which is not an exaggeration. Why would you need to go to—what is it, an artisan coffee shop? What the hell is artisan coffee,” Percy said. “It’s coffee, right? No matter what you do, it’s just coffee. It can’t be art.”

“Maybe because I like it?” she snapped, and before she said anything else, she turned back to her pancakes. 

Percy recognized where and when to not press further—or at least he did about seventy-five percent of the time, it honestly depended mostly on his mood. During her trips to Olympus as its architect she’d heard just about everyone mention that Poseidon’s moods were fickle, ephemeral, that he was a god permanently caught in a cosmic pendulum, and she’d always thought _why did that have to be the one personality trait he offered his son?_ Because Percy could be similarly frustrating, in that his bad moods seemed to materialize out of nothing, and that almost everything he did was variable, that everything relied on circumstance. Percy couldn’t be relied on to let a thing go one hundred percent of the time; there’d always be these exceptions, and she could never see them coming.

The mood was effectively taken out back and stabbed to death. They finished their pancakes in silence, and when they walked back to their apartment, Percy still wrapped her hand in his but he didn’t kiss her knuckles every half-block. Annabeth wasn’t aware that she’d ever miss feeling like a sexy, funny pedometer, but life was full of surprises.

She unlocked their apartment and pushed through the door. “I’m going back to sleep,” she said, dropping her keys on the table unceremoniously. 

Behind her, Percy huffed, a short, frustrated sound—it was almost absurd, how much he sounded like the heinous animals he worked with. The cut-off noises, the loud sighs. Poseidon must have put something of himself into the horse, the same pieces of himself he put into Percy.

She turned on her heel, knowing that the expression on her face was thunderous from the way Percy’s brows drew together. “What, you’ve got a problem with the coffee I drink, and now you’ve got a problem with when I choose to sleep?”

“You’ve got a problem with what I choose to talk about, I don’t know why you’re acting like that’s just a me thing,” Percy shot back, toeing off his sneakers. He needed new ones, and badly. Every time she mentioned it he pulled a face and said that his shoes were fine, even though he’d had them for three years and they were held together by sheer force of will, and a little glue Percy used to keep the soles attached to the bottom of the shoe. 

“I’ve got a problem with your stupid shoes,” she said. “You have the rest of today off, right? Please go buy a new pair of shoes.”

Percy’s brows crawled to his hairline. “Why is it about _shoes_ now? Why is it—what’s happening here. I’m sorry if you felt bad because I insulted your taste in coffee?”  
  
  


Annabeth ground her molars. “You’re sorry that _I_ felt bad, not that you said something that was kind of dickish.”

“I would not define telling you that artisan coffee is expensive as ‘kind of dickish’,” he said, crossing his arms. He leaned against the counter, stretching his legs out, crossing them at the ankles. He looked casual, like he was discussing anything but this, and it made Annabeth’s heart slam against her sternum at the same time her face flushed hot with anger.

“You’re right, it was incredibly dickish, my bad.”

Percy scowled. “What’s dickish about it.”

Annabeth gestured wildly. “Maybe it’s because it’s a thing that I enjoy, a treat that I like getting, and maybe I don’t want to be made to feel like shit because I buy a _cup of fucking coffee?”_

“It’s not—” Percy paused, raking a hand through his hair, so the curls fluffed out in all directions. “You don’t buy a two dollar cup of coffee sometimes. You buy a six dollar latte, sometimes twice a day, a couple days a week. That’s ridiculous. A treat is going to Burger King sometimes. A treat is renting a movie for a couple bucks sometimes. _That’s_ not a treat.”

Annabeth forced herself to take a deep breath. “What does the _cost_ have to do with it?”

The sink roared to life, the pipes rattling with the force of it, and Percy said, “Oh, shut it,” and flicked his hand, and the tap trickled to a stop almost reluctantly. “The entire point _is_ the cost! I wouldn’t be—do you think I like telling you not to do things that make you happy? God knows you of all people deserve a little break sometimes. It’s—but it can’t be that.”

Annabeth felt some of the fire melt out of her, that obstinate, blinding anger; inevitably, in terse conversations, Percy would end up saying something that sliced the hamstrings of her resolve. And then he’d say something that would bring that wall of rage crashing back into her, but she tried to follow her sliced hamstrings more often than the intensity of her emotion. “And why can’t it be that? It’s not hurting us. We’re fine.”

Percy looked strangled, for a second, before he swallowed hard and said, “I don’t think you can rely on being fine.”

“I don’t think you can rely on being scared that your finances are going to go to shit the second you look away,” she said. “You’re not palming five bucks off a kid because you want to do something nice to your mom.”

Percy scrubbed at the scar swirling up his neck, but this time, more furiously, and Annabeth crossed the kitchen and pulled his arm down. “Sorry,” he said, tightly, without looking at her.

Annabeth pulled his hand to her mouth and pressed a kiss to his knuckle. “That’s okay,” she said. “But scratching makes it worse.”

Percy grunted. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Invulnerable but not. I know.”

Annabeth curled her hand into his, tangling their fingers, hoping that was a good enough _I love you,_ hoping she could ever say those words the way Percy deserved to hear them. “You said you got shook down, for most of the money. Your business partner?”

“Why ask,” Percy said.

“Curiosity. I like knowing things about you.”

“My stepdad tried to teach me to play blackjack,” Percy said. “With his friends. But he made me come up with the money. That’s the only good memory I have of him, kind of. Ended badly. But I took a cut, for the hair clips.”

Annabeth’s skin prickled with the unspoken, _I took a lot more than just a cut, for the hair clips,_ and she busied herself by playing with Percy’s fingers.

“I never told you why I hate McDonald’s so much,” she said, swallowing. “It’s because that’s a lot of what we ate, me, Luke, and Thalia. It was easy to steal from people walking out, easier than stealing from grocery stores, and it was hot. You get to missing hot food. So I hate it, now, I guess.”

Percy tilted Annabeth’s jaw up with his fingers, pressed a kiss against her lips; something soft, something chaste, a gentle, _come live with me now, in this moment._ When he pulled away Annabeth was breathless.

“I’ll try to shut up about the lattes,” he said.

Annabeth shrugged. “But I do buy a lot. Limits are fine.”

Percy kissed her forehead. “I have to work tomorrow,” he said, and he said it like a challenge.

“Snuggle on the couch?”

“I love your taste in romance,” he said.

They tangled together on their too-small couch, switching between old _Stargate_ episodes and the horrors of Camp Crystal Lake; they only woke up enough to fiddle with the remote, and sometimes make out, but mostly she curled up against Percy’s chest and he folded his arm around her shoulders and they lived in the moment.

**Author's Note:**

> HHhhhhhHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhHHHh I'm still actually very soft. Wth. Wth
> 
> Now I have to clean out my WIPs to clear the way to write a Jercy fic, because I have to hold up my end of a terrible bargain I made. Oof.


End file.
